


Of Pinchbeck and Celadon

by anomieow



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: AU - Edwardian Era, Anal Sex, Angst, BDSM, Biting/Marking, Frenemies with Benefits, Hand Kink, Humiliation kink, Implied Consent, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Praise Kink, Profanity, Rough Sex, Spanking, Topson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:20:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23555221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomieow/pseuds/anomieow
Summary: When he’d first spotted him, performing elementary sleight-of-hand tricks for a cluster of children outside a butcher shop, Cornelius had been compelled by his apparent innocence. A sucker if he’d ever seen one, from the faint pang of dairy country in his voice to his wide green eyes and ready, blushing smile. At least, that’s what he’d thought. And so he’d sidled up and made his acquaintance. It was the only time Cornelius Hickey had ever been wrong about a man.
Relationships: Cornelius Hickey/Thomas Jopson
Comments: 12
Kudos: 43





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In which Tom Jopson, illusionist, decides he can no longer tolerate his assistant and agent, one Cornelius Hickey, swindling him.
> 
> Chapter 1 of 2.

“These are new,” Tom observes, loosely grasping Cornelius by the wrist and turning it just so his cufflinks gleam in the chill afternoon light of the high-ceilinged hotel room.

Cornelius grins—a crooked, confident grin, and his steel-colored eyes flash with something like mirth. “Nice, aren’t they? Most convincing pinchbeck I’ve seen.”

“Would’ve fooled me,” Tom murmurs, examining them. Letting go, he glides his fingertips across the finely articulated tendons and knuckles of Cornelius’ hand. “Wherever did you get them?”

“They were a gift,” Cornelius answers in a sly tone, “from an admirer.” He steals a sidewise glance at his companion but his face is impassive. When he’d first spotted him, performing elementary sleight-of-hand tricks for a cluster of children outside a butcher shop, Cornelius had been compelled by his apparent innocence. A sucker if he’d ever seen one, from the faint pang of dairy country in his voice to his wide green eyes and ready, blushing smile. At least, that’s what he’d thought. And so he’d sidled up and made his acquaintance. It was the only time Cornelius Hickey had ever been wrong about a man.

Does he regret his error in judgment? Pretending to fuss with his pale red mustache in the mirror, he watches Tom finish dressing. He’s a lean man, his form as elegantly balanced as a fine paring knife. Subtly curved brows and thick lashes frame eyes a green for which there’s no name... celadon? That’s one descriptor that surfaces, though he can’t recall precisely what—well, leave it to more sentimental men to wax poetic. What Cornelius truly admires is that behind the angelic countenance ticks a clockworks hardly less complex and capable than Cornelius’ own, only to a different end—Tom possesses neither the cynicism nor the inclination toward deceit that Cornelius does. In all respects but one, he is drably, predictably decent. A waste of intellect? Sure. But were they equally wicked they would’ve consumed one another by now, and their partnership would not be half as lucrative as it was turning out to be.

Tom, Cornelius soon learned, was a hell of a magician. Pardon, an illusionist. For that’s the term Tom prefers, making it clear each time he priggishly corrects him. He knows every literal trick in the book and performs them with such ease and seeming guilelessness that even cynics and curmudgeons are charmed by him—to say nothing of wives, daughters, and men of a certain bent, all willing to shell out for the privilege of simply watching him onstage. He could be performing dazzling illusions or silently darning socks; he has fans who would not have given a single damn.

And what he does not have, Cornelius supplies. A cunning promoter and inveterate gladhander, he’s booked Tom in venues he wouldn’t have dreamed of on his own. He is also architect of the charismatic image that draws people to Thomas Jopson, Illusionist—that is, the young country lad inexplicably bestowed with mystical gifts. But most importantly, he’s been given carte blanche to negotiate performance fees on Tom’s behalf. For this, Tom is immensely grateful. Ever the consummate artist, he doesn’t wish the pursuit of his craft to be sullied in the least by business. Even the mention of money pains him. So Cornelius considers the extra twenty percent he skims from each venue a sort of convenience fee to ensure Tom’s focus, the purity of his craft. 

“Who gave them to you?” Tom asks him, turning in the mirror to make sure the tails of his coat fall just so against his legs. He will not brook being teased for his vanity, Cornelius learned early on. His jaw recalls the ache of that lesson, his lungs the scrabble for breath each time his nose was jammed flush into the nest of dark hair at the root of Tom’s cock. His own prick twitches at the memory just as a sense of indignation surges through him.

He smiles again and meets the other man’s reflected gaze. “We aren’t jealous, Tom?”

“Jealous? no.” He turns and regards his business partner appraisingly as he plucks his dinner jacket up from where it hangs on the knob of the footboard. “Wait, don’t put your jacket on yet—I haven’t stitched the lining.” He takes the shabby, too-large coat from Cornelius, who gazes at him with mild amusement, and lays it over the corner of a battered steamer trunk. Then he takes up a little wooden box overflowing with spools of thread, pincushions, thimbles. Picking out some black thread and a small needle, and folding the cuff of the jacket so a small rip is exposed, he begins to mend. “I’m just keen to know who’d give you links of real gold,” he says, darting the needle in so quickly, so neatly, that one could imagine him doing it with eyes closed. 

It’s not inconceivable for Cornelius to have pierced some man’s heart—perhaps with his smile and honeyed tongue, perhaps with an actual knife. Tom prefers not to think too hard about it. Though the small, sharp-featured man is not at all his type, and is core-rotten besides, he’s a pleasure to look upon in a way difficult to describe: his magnetism lies not so much in his features but in the spirit that animates them, a bright, inquisitive bonhomie easily mistaken for kindness. Particularly the eyes, which seem to find equal gladness in all things: pleasure, suffering, immorality. Tom is aware of those eyes on him now as he sews and against his wishes it warms him. 

“I never cease to marvel at how quick you are,” Cornelius muses as Tom nips the thread and rises to hand him the coat.

“I’m not mending it again,” he says. “You need a new coat.” Then he grasps Cornelius by the shoulders. “Now, Neil—those links are gold and I should like to know how you came by them.”

Cornelius tsks smilingly, deepening the dimples in his cheek. “An admirer. I told you. Didn’t strike me you’d be so petty about it.” He steps closer to Tom—and before he can brace himself, Tom’s spun him round and thrown his balance with his knee, knocking him chest-first onto the bed. His hipbones crash painfully against the arabesque wrought-iron of the footboard, canting his ass upward and slacking his legs so the toes of his boots graze the wooden floor.

He could squirm his way free, for Tom holds both his hands at the small of his back with only one of his own. But he won’t. A moment later, he feels a flutter as light as a spider’s tread on his wrist as Tom tugs from a hidden pocket in his sleeve the cobalt blue scarf Cornelius knows he keeps there. Then, the tug and pinch of his wrists being bound. Tight, tighter than you’d think silk could go. He smirks into the neatly made bed, inhaling deeply the faint odor of sun-aired cotton and the stale ghost of strangers’ tobacco. It’s quite nice to be him just then: it is May, dusk, 1910; his supper is sung for for a good while. And it looks like dinner—an arrangement he’s been dreading, some table d’hote affair with a few of Tom’s most ardent admirers—is to be postponed. He flutters his eyes shut, anticipating… and afraid.

———

Tom has known for awhile about the twenty percent and doesn’t particularly give a damn. His own earnings are plenty and he invests them wisely. In a similar vein he considers feigning a blind eye to Cornelius’ skimming an investment in the man’s continuing loyalty. Such a thing cannot be bought, he knows, but it might be rented. And the rent paid isn’t that twenty percent, it’s the perpetuation of the illusion for Cornelius that he’s the cleverer of them both. But the cufflinks gall Tom—they’re gaudy, for one thing. And for him to flash about in his face evidence of his deceit is just too provoking. Let Cornelius think him naive, fine. But he won’t be regarded as a complete fool.

Having bound Cornelius’ wrists, he steps back and drinks in what he sees. He adores Cornelius’ hands. They’re pale and finely made, with long and elegant fingers. And there’s something about a man in naught but a shirtsleeves and waistcoat thats always done something to him. Idly he palms his awakening cock. His eyes travel the length of Cornelius’ trim body. It is spring and the cool, generous light of early dusk pools around his head and shoulders, striking copper sparks in his hair. His cheek is the warm, pure pale of cream. His gaze follows the arrow of his bound wrists to his small, shapely ass, and on down legs he knows to be lithely muscular under shabbily-fitting trousers. 

He eyes with faint disapproval the cuffs of Cornelius’ overlong trousers bunched sloppily over the heels of his Chelsea boots. He is always buying readymade clothes, sometimes even secondhand, that are just barely too large—as if in his late twenties he were still expecting to grow into them. The result is an air of untidiness that hangs about him like a stale odor, and makes him seem even smaller than he is besides.

“Why, this hem will scuff, Neil,” he scolds in a genial tone, as though chastising a pet. Then he sits down on the bed next to him and rests his left hand on the broad of his back. “This admirer of yours ought to have sent you to a haberdasher instead. Is it money, Neil?” He feels Cornelius tense under the touch of his old, familiar name. Whether he bristles with resentment or anticipatory pleasure, Tom doesn’t know. Both, most likely.

“Are you not paid enough to attire yourself decently?” He presses his weight down through his palm and spread fingers as he leans down close so each word drips into Cornelius’ ear. “Or is money not the problem? I think... the trouble is...” he abruptly nips the shell of Cornelius’ ear, eliciting a buck and startled whine, “...that you’ve no idea how to be decent. You need taught. Don’t you?”

Cornelius doesn’t answer. His face is turned away, but Tom can feel all the muscles in his body coiled against him. Pressing back. “I asked you a question, love.”

“Visiting a haberdasher makes you no more a decent man,” Cornelius mutters at last, turning his head to level the full fierceness of his gaze at Tom, “than pulling at a cow’s tit makes you a calf... you filthy fucking halfwit farm boy.”

Tom smiles gently and strokes the bound man’s hair. Soft. “The mouth on you,” he sighs, moving his fingers from Cornelius’ hair to stroke his lips with his thumb. “Such profanity.”

“Ironic, coming from one who regularly profanes it. Listen, might we do something about my hips? They’ll bruise.”

“Bruises suit you. One for each hipbone.”

“Or each cufflink.”

“If you’d like. Or each ten percent.” Cornelius tenses. Tom takes his hands in his own and begins to stroke them. “Anyway,” he says, ghosting his fingertips first along the delicate ridges of his metacarpal bones, at once touching and not touching the shallow valleys between, “It pleases me to have you just like this.” Abruptly he reaches up and brings his open palm down, hard, on Cornelius’ ass. Cornelius gasps as, instinctively trying to move away from the red surge of pain, he grinds his hipbones against the iron. “And I suspect,” he muses, sliding his hand between the bars of the footboard to cup Cornelius’ hardened prick, “that it pleases you as well.”

The toes of his boots scrabble on the floor as he tries vainly to rut into Tom’s hand, but he withdraws it almost as quickly as he’d offered it. Instead, he returns his attention to Cornelius’ hands, slipping his fingers into the cup of darkness made by his curled fingers. “Plain of Mars,” he murmurs, stroking the lined heart of the palm. Then lightly he caresses the mound at the base of the thumb. “Mount of Venus,” he says, listening to the quickening of the other man’s breath. “And…” he lowers his mouth to the padded angle of bone where the palm gives way to the outer wrist, there above where the pulse sings, “the mount of Neptune.” He’s whispering now, sounding nearly reverent.

“Do you remember,” Tom asks thoughtfully, “how when we met you told me you could read my palm?”

Cornelius tries to twist his hands away, suddenly resentful of how well Tom knows his body. Like how his exquisitely sensitive hands and wrists render him pliant, vulnerable—more naked than he’d be if stripped. “Hand-holding’s for sweethearts,Tom,” he snarls. “Hurry and fuck me.”


	2. Chapter 2

Early May: goose and gander leading their awkward, toddling brood along strips of lawn burgeoning with daisies. Bees orbiting pollen-laden blooms. In the alley between the tobacconist’s and the bakery, one angular, rangy cat stalked another: a curious fondness, Cornelius has, for cats. So Tom had stopped to watch them for a moment. These two were the unremarkable gray all feral cats take on, the shadows in which they live coloring their coats. He shifted the weight of the bundles in his arms (some tobacco, a loaf of heavy bread, a fat little jar of mustard, and a book Cornelius asked for, some arctic memoir by a fellow named Shackleton). The smaller of the two yowled in that low, distorted, bitter way of a queen cat in heat and lowered herself to her belly and the tom, his tread neat and silent, approached. Tom hurried on, through the lobby of their modest hotel and up the stairs. 

_Man, too, is a kind of animal,_ he reminded himself, opening the door to find Cornelius lounging in the threadbare wingback chair beneath the window, reading and smoking. _But man, with his tentatively superior brain, has exalted the instinct to rut into something involving courtship, domesticity._ Cornelius’ slender feet were bare, ankle resting over his knee; his hair was damp and slicked back from a face that, at rest, was really a very youthful and sweet one. Cherubic, even, despite—because of?—its unorthodoxy of feature. _Would that we could just violently wrestle one another down in long grass,_ he’d mused, watching Cornelius lay the book aside—one slender finger marking place—to take a sip of tea. _Have it over with._ Simultaneously he’d felt a tenderness—husbandly, it was, this sense of protectiveness and good fortune that filled his breast, _look, love, I’ve brought the book you asked for—_ and a hunger to shatter that feeling at its root. 

Now, later that afternoon, with Cornelius laid before him almost like a banquet, he considers doing exactly that: fucking him, brute and swift. Maybe a gobbet of spit to ready him. Like their first time. He recalls more readily the prelude, the courtship—the feathery dance of Cornelius’ fingers on his palm, the afternoon so stifling the air pressed against one’s body like wax—like one was a candle wick awaiting the lick of the match. Christ, he’d wanted to fall apart for Cornelius: crack himself open and let the audacious scrap of a stranger climb inside. (He did not: and thank Christ for that.) All this, he recalls with searing clarity, and keeps it close to his heart the way another man might keep a locket. But this does not mean he’s forgotten how, there in Tom’s rented attic room, under ceilings so low neither could stand upright, Cornelius had shoved him down and taken him hard, unprepared. He’d pulled his hair, clasped him by the throat. And he’d left bruises on his hips, a constellation of them roughly the shape of his fingertips and palms where he’d held him in place.

“Say I did,” Tom says to him now, returning all his weight to his hand spread flat on his back. “Fuck you. Like you did me that night. Like a mongrel does a bitch.” Tom seldom swears but the words feel good on his tongue: as smooth and dark as prayer. 

“I always have wondered why you’ve never returned the favor. Is it because you’re such a gentleman, Tom? Or are you content to just make a cunny of my mouth?”

It’s true. In two years, Tom’s been gentle, almost leisurely, when it comes to the act itself—patiently, with immense self-control, he draws it out until Cornelius is trembling and exhausted, and only then does he allow them both to finish. And it’s also true that what he sometimes does to Cornelius’ trim, clever mouth is closer to fucking, holding him in place with two fistfuls of fine red hair and driving his cock as far into his throat as it will go. But mostly, he is every bit as deliberate and grave as he is onstage. And like any good illusionist, the line between the method and the magic dissolves by the time the curtain is lowered. Stagecraft, it is, Tom realizes with a mild twinge of humiliation. Stagecraft: a pantomime, its choreography mutually agreed upon, in which both eventually get what they want. For Tom, the illusion he is in control; for Cornelius the fleeting illusion he is not. Little hurts, trivial humiliations: Cornelius has a taste for receiving them as Tom does for providing them, yet none of it makes Cornelius his any more than buying him cufflinks or having him measured for a fine suit might.

“I do that just because it pleases you, love,” Tom says with a soft smile as he reaches between the bars of the footboard to free Cornelius’ rose-pink prick—girthy for his build—and begins to stroke softly. “At least, your cock always seems pleased enough. Ready to go off like a Roman Candle by the time I’m done with that pretty little mouth.”

“I’ve always said you’ve an ear for poetics. ‘Cock like a Roman candle.’ Brilliant.” Cornelius is trying to mock him, but by his soft-focus gaze and the soft catch of breath between words, Tom knows the fight’s ebbing out of him. _Only because you’ve your hand on his cock, Tom. Could be anyone’s._

Three more smacks follow in rhythmic succession, each strike grinding the delicate flesh of his hipbone between the iron footboard and the pretty little hillocks of bone beneath. He groans from deep in his chest and huffs it out through his nose. Tom wants him to cry out, but this he never does. And of course he’s fully hard now, his breath coming in jagged huffs as he kicks and squirms to gain purchase against Tom’s fist.

“What a funny little thing you are,” Tom says quietly. “You love when it hurts.”

“Yes,” he mutters savagely, his eyes closed. He’s at the edge. “Jesus, fuck—you know I do—” 

Tom digs his nails into the reddening flesh of Cornelius’ buttock, dancing his fingers as he does so over his weeping head before letting go. Abandoned at just the moment of crisis, his prick twitches angrily. Cornelius’ eyes flash open as he looks over his shoulder at Tom, brows knit. But his head is too muddled to string words together. 

“Not until I’m ready,” Tom explains briskly. “Now, down, if you would—ah, there we go,” he helps maneuver Cornelius down off the footboard, onto his knees and chest. He leans over him and examines the cufflinks. They’re sturdily made, oblong yellow-gold with a twining vine design filigreed round the border. Simple bullet-back closure. In a subtler metal—rose-gold and silver damascene, perhaps—they would’ve been lovely. But the yellow-gold is tasteless, gleams too bright. He unclips them and lays them on the nightstand. Then, to Cornelius’ surprise, he unties his wrists. 

“You love when it hurts,” Tom repeats, stroking his hair gently. “I know you do. I’ll take care of you.” Then the scarf is over his eyes and knotted taut at the back of his skull scarcely the time it takes him to draw a breath. He almost speaks before he knows what to say— _no? Is that it?_ He’s never blindfolded him before. Well, it doesn’t matter. _No_ is nothing; it’s action that counts. And that, so long as his arms are free, he can manage. If it comes to it. The idea that he might have to buck, to fight—the possibility of real danger—is a new one. His flagging erection revives as he rolls onto his back, knowing Tom likes what he sees. He stretches, arcing his back, and smiles—bares his teeth.

Tom straddles him loosely so the stiff serge of his trousers barely grazes him while his thighs hold him in place. Then in one swift movement—he senses what is coming and braces for it—Tom’s palm sings through the air and strikes his cheek. It’s a shot across the bow, a warning: _I didn’t tell you to turn over._ But neither man wants Cornelius’ face bruised. Then his mouth is on his throat, his collar, sucking and biting. His nipples tugged between teeth—almost too hard and then it _is_ too hard, it hurts too much, but it’s a matter of pride to not cry out, not refuse. And then the lips and tongue laving the bitten spot with affectionate gentleness, and Tom’s hand again seeking its way between Cornelius’ legs.

In the still, warm air of the room, the only sound is the two men, both breathing a little heavier than usual. Gradually, Cornelius becomes conscious too of the song of blackbirds through the window: a shrill, nimble trilling. Somehow strident and melodious at once. It’s a sound he’s heard his whole life and thought little of, but he’s listening now. Funny the things one thinks of. He does want Tom to _fuck_ him, to drive into him like— _I killed a man once,_ he wants to tell him. _When I was a lad. Knifed him up through the ribcage. Lucky shot but I remember the feel of it. Feeling the strength of my arm enter the blade like a kind of devil, and the blade, thus transfigured, sure transfigured that old fucking filthy pederast—into a fucking filthy corpse—_ And that’s what he wants to feel now: not literal death, but a kind of transfiguration. To be shattered and remade. But he’s never believed Tom to possess the courage, nor suspected the other man to know him so well. He lies still, worrying his lower lip between his teeth until he tastes blood. Somehow, he is undressed, kissed, bitten—in the dark he swears he can feel like heliotropic blooms the blood of young bruises rising and turning toward the sun of Tom’s mouth. And he listens to the blackbirds. How has he never noticed that they sing at dusk, that their voices swell fullest in the liminal space between day and dark?


	3. Chapter 3

Cornelius’ body is smooth, muscular, pale; Tom pauses once or twice in his path south to admire the scattering of marks he’s leaving there. It’s like a little garden, each spreading of blood just below the skin a bloom. The other man will hurt tomorrow; he will move gingerly so as to baby all the tender places Tom’s made. He’s never slowed it down like this, biting and sucking and tasting as with his hand he coaxes Cornelius time and again to the trembling edge and waltzes him back again. He’s drawing it all out, as adroitly as he draws out the suspenseful escalation of some particular illusion for the benefit of a gaping audience, but to what end and for whom evades him. He is acting by instinct now, doing what he pleases because it pleases them both. At first, he hadn’t been able to read Cornelius: he’d stiffened defensively against the blindfold; the first denial he’d cursed and the second, reached down, almost as though by absent-minded habit, to take himself in hand. At this, Tom had dug his thumb’s tip, hard, into the soft spot where the base meets the balls and advised him in his politest tone not to do it again. 

But now something in Cornelius has—shifted, somehow. Hard to explain. He’s totally pliant under Tom’s ministrations, wordless. He’s usually sharp-tongued to the last, never quite surrendering that last vestige of an upper hand, no matter how inventively Tom hurts and teases him. But whether because of the blindfold or his being tethered at the edge of bliss for so long, he is now pure reaction: animal joy. And yielding: his whole body, from his long and delicate toes to his flushed cheeks, is a song of yielding, a paean. Some last rampart toppled. 

Tom lifts his mouth from Cornelius’ hipbone, which is garlanded by a daisy chain of bruises, darker than the rest of the marks. “You bruise so easily,” Tom murmurs, stilling his hand. “Are you—is it all right?”

“Beautiful,” Cornelius answers in a soft, dazed voice. 

“You _are_ ,” Tom says. “Marked up so, and all those pretty little sounds you’re making. It pleases me.”

“Good,” Cornelius mumbles. “I like… when you are pleased.”

Tom listens for any trace of scorn in his voice, any trace of insincerity, but finds none. “Is that so? You admit that you like to please me?”

Cornelius nods, somewhat helplessly. “I want you to want me always,” he says. “I’m no good, Tom, you know I’m no good, but at least I can make you _feel_ good, and—” he bucks and struggles for words as Tom resumes his soft, relentless stroking of his cock, which is now tinged faintly purplish, veins risen, “—I want to be good for you.”

“Mmm,” Tom breathes, turning to nestle his lips into the warm, salty juncture of leg and hip, “I don’t know what I should do with you if you were good,” he admits. “I certainly wouldn’t torture you so, and that…” he seizes a bit of this, Cornelius’ tenderest skin, between his teeth and rolls it against his tongue; lets go the moment the resulting whine threatens to crescendo into a scream, “...well, that’d be wretched, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, but Jesus fuck, Tom—you have to let me—I don’t know how much more I can take…”

“Well, I do aim to fuck you... and I don’t mean to be a gentleman about it. Perhaps then.” His own breath is coming in hitches; he’s been ignoring his own semi-hardened yard and now it’s fattening again, imagining itself sheathed in Cornelius’ body as snugly as a blade cleaving flesh. 

“I wish you would,” Cornelius says quietly. “I want you to — what was it you said earlier? Like a mongrel does a bitch.”

“You’re indecent, is what you are.”

“Please.”

“Please what?”

“Please… fuck me, Tom. Please—you, your cock, I want you in me and I want you to _take_ me, be rough as you’d like—I need you to—”

“Indecent. Filthy. Need the decency fucked back into you. Is that so?”

“Please, yes.” his speech is still soft and warm, but his eyes, dark now in the grainy blue half light of early evening, glitter with tears, “Please—”

“Say it. Say you’re no good, you’re filthy and indecent.”

“I’m no good,” he says softly. “I’m filthy, indecent. And I need you to fuck me—til I’m good again.”

In the dark, Cornelius hears Tom unbutton his trousers. “Because it pleases you, love, I shall. Hands and knees.”

Cornelius grimaces as he rolls onto his stomach, his whole torso throbbing from being bruised and bitten. He feels Tom’s weight shift as he raises himself to his knees behind him and a moment later his Tom’s fingers are forcing their way into his mouth. He opens to let them in, laves them with saliva.

“Clever boy,” Tom murmurs. “Didn’t even have to ask.” _God,_ Cornelius thinks, _how does he know what words will set my slowing heart hammering again?_ “If—this is too much, honestly, you must tell me,” he continues, kinder. 

“I want _too much_.”

“All the same. A word. Let us have a word we can use, a code—and I will stop—” 

“Celadon,” Cornelius says. “I will say ‘celadon’.”

“Celadon,” Tom repeats, slightly puzzled. “Very well.”

Then his index finger is twisting its unceremonious way in. Hurts: a good pain that slices into his brain with the hot purity of noon light. His middle finger a moment later. Cornelius’ breath halts in his throat and for a moment it’s nearly too much. Their safe word— _a green for which there’s no name_ —is even on his lips. But then there’s this wave of weightlessness that surges through him. He feels at once like he is all body, all singing nerves and exhausted, exultant bones, and bodiless, as though he drifts outside himself. Aloft, transcendent. Pain is no longer mere pain, but a stairway spiraling skyward. Then he feels the head of Tom’s cock pressing against where he is not quite ready but he’ll yield, he’ll yield; without hesitation all of him yields.

Tom listens and watches for too much pain. He’s responsible for his lover now, for he’s entered again that state of ecstatic, senseless pliancy in which Tom could break his bones and he’d thank him for it. It’s a funny new thing for Tom, this responsibility, bearing with it a level of trust that makes him tremble inwardly. He must not hurt him precisely because he so easily could. But he also feels in his own way safer than usual. Not that Cornelius will be reformed, or that he’s not a broken and dangerous man—a walking scar, badly healed—but he understands at last that Cornelius needs him. Even if it’s the same fractured, jag-edged need Tom feels for him, an affection too malformed to yet be called love, it is something. It is anything. Not gold but closer to it than pinchbeck. It is reassurance that Cornelius, in all his pettiness and charm, his guile and curiosity, the mayhem and brightness and difficult pleasures he offers—all are his at least for the time being.

Slowly, steadily, he breaches Cornelius, who sways a little on his knees, low moans escaping gritted teeth; his hands are curled into white-knuckled fists against the bed. He’s sublimely tight, and Tom is glad he’s had little in the way of direct stimulation—otherwise he’d be done embarrassingly quick. He stops short of completely sheathed, gauging how Cornelius is doing. His whole body is tensed against him but he’s quiet.

“All right?” Tom ventures.

“Thank you, but you’re being much too much the gentleman,” Cornelius retorts. There’s a touch of the familiar petty snarl in his tone and it’s enough to sting Tom into grunting and driving the rest of the way into him, out, in again, and out. Cornelius rocks down onto his elbows, hissing with pain but pressing his ass up toward Tom.

“That more to your liking?”

“You think?”

“Mmm. You are indecent. Disgusting. And…” He grabs Cornelius roughly by his hair and yanks. “...Up on your hands, I said.” He drags his hand down Cornelius’ back and ribcage, and then, digging his fingertips in at the hips, where he knows it’s already bruised, he slams himself into the root. He begins to thrust in and out as quick and hard as he pleases, watching with a mix of wonder and escalating pleasure as Cornelius takes it, panting and moaning rhythmically, his arms shaking as he holds himself up. 

“That’s it,” Tom says, this time without breaking rhythm. “Just like that.” He feels his own body rising to the punishing pace he’s set, the diffuse warmth of his own climax on the far horizon. He reaches around and takes Cornelius once again in firmly in hand. He’s still achingly hard. “Oh, you love this—my beautiful, dirty boy.”

“Jesus fuck,” Cornelius says shakily. “I might—”

“Not yet, I’m not ready—” Tom answers, his own voice punctuated with ragged gasps. His own pleasure, a different kind than he’s used to, a wide warm trembling, is gathering into itself, readying, ecstasy opening like a slow bright flower. 

“Please,” Cornelius is pleading, “please, you feel so good, like, like fucking heaven, Tom, I can’t, please let me, please, please—” His pleas are at once desperate, verging again on tearful, and reverential. His head bowed. And he waiting, holding back. Terrified he will spend before he’s allowed. 

“God, but you’re so good,” Tom breathes, himself so close he must slack his pace. “So, so—beautiful, and working so hard for me, to please me—so pretty you are, and so fucking dirty—” he takes a deep breath, struggling himself to string words together. “Come for me,” he says.

“Thank you,” Cornelius gasps, and he means it. Then with a hissed curse and a last backwards thrust, he stiffens, and the taut red heat of his body contracts around Tom as he spends all over the bed, his own chest, Tom’s fist. Then he resumes moving with the pace Tom has set. “Return the favor,” he says, his voice sly but soft. Not imperious. 

The muscles of his arms and back flex, gleaming softly with sweat. God, but he _is_ beautiful. Beautiful and hard and clever and _his_. Later? There is no later: three more thrusts and Tom’s consciousness distilled down to the blaze of joyous, pure light pouring from his body into Cornelius’. “Mine,” he murmurs into the delicate, sweat-slick jut of Cornelius’ shoulder blade, “mine, mine, mine.” And he yields; without hesitation all of him yields.

* * * 

The smoke of Cornelius’ cigarette hovers above them, nearly invisible in the last lingering half-light of the slow-fading day—a tired ghost. Usually he’s talkative after sex, either querulous or effusive, but never particularly present. Then he’ll step out for a couple hours of “fresh air”, or drop quickly into sleep in a fetal huddle at the far edge of the mattress. But tonight he’s silent, lingers near.

“How are you?” Tom ventures after a stretch of quiet—a few voices in the street, the sweet cacophony of bird trills thinning to a scattering of song. 

Cornelius slides his forearm over so it touches Tom’s. He turns to face him, resting the side of his head against the headboard. He doesn’t answer, only smiles his inscrutable smile. His eyes twinkle in the rising dark.


End file.
